Opera has decent market share in central and eastern Europe.

In Ukraine and Russia it's huge:

http://clear.com.ua/projects/ee_browsers/?ukraine

Wow! Thanks for that. I really need to break the habit of assuming the world follows US patterns because Google, Silicon Valley, etc are in the US.

Also Germany, Scandinavia and parts of Japan I have found uses this browser. Europe more in percent than America. I am not sure why this is. If any one knows or guesses, I would be curious to find out.

For one thing, it's a Norwegian company, which explains its popularity in Scandinavia, and could mean more focus and expertise on internationalization. Second, some of its features are more suited to Eastern European markets. Computers tend to be older and cheaper, and Opera works well in low-CPU/low-memory environments[1]. Many connections are still on dial-up, and many ISPs charge by the megabyte, and Opera has a number of options for saving bandwidth, like disabling images or using a proxy compression server. These advantages are probably less important nowadays than 5 or 10 years ago, but by now it's an established player, which helps.

[1] On machines with lots of RAM it tends to be a memory hog, but it works perfectly fine in tighter environments. They claim their memory strategy changes depending on local conditions.

> I guess you have to credit Opera for sticking it out this long, years after they dropped off the radar of basically everybody.

I don't get it. They were never on the radar. They are now. They've got more than 140 million users.

> I keep hearing that their mobile browser is big, but it seems that nobody has ever visited any of my sites using it.

It has 1/4 of the mobile browser market, and mobile browsing is expected to be bigger than PCs in a couple of years (it's actually growing that fast).

Opera exists on the basis of the superb mobile browsers - Opera Mobile and _especially_ Opera Mini. (there was a previous post about this http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1882753)

In India, where smartphone penetration has just started, pretty much Opera Mini is defacto here. Especially with the cheap, underpowered Chinese smartphones which come pre-installed with Opera Mini.

In fact, a significant percentage of Nokia phones out here are preinstalled with Opera Mini (or Opera Mobile). I'm pretty sure there is a per-device licensing that is making money for them.

More than 1/3 of Opera's revenue is from the desktop browser. It's simply false to claim that it exists on the basis of mobile browsers (superb or not).